Rue's Butterfly: From Caregiving to Living My Bucket List

By Donna McCart Welser

"My life was broken and put back together in unexpected ways that made it multidimensional and extraordinary. Learning to live in the moment has not been easy. Rewriting the story continuously and consciously would not have happened without the brokenness."

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: May 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9798885041843

Book preview

Foreword

Books that inspire you to have an honest conversation with yourself serve a noble purpose. It’s been a privilege and a blessing to have known Donna McCart Welser since my early teens. We are part of a large group of friends who graduated high school in 1984 and have remained close ever since. Donna was ambitious then and remains so in writing this book.

Be prepared for a treat.

What’s on your bucket list? That question has become one of the best conversation starters. It is always surprising to hear the things that people will identify. Go around the room and you will hear about running a marathon, painting a mural, traveling to Europe, cliff diving, starting a charity, hiking, woodworking, running with the bulls; the list goes on and on.

The one thing that is forgotten about these creative and exciting life experience goals is that sometimes life gets in the way of them. Achieving your bucket list requires effort. In this book, Donna pulls back the cover to reveal what that work looks like in the face of leading your day-to-day life. She is uniquely qualified to tell this story as she has figured out the path to leading her best life in spite of tremendous hardships and pain. This book is not only one person’s story but serves as a guide for those seeking to pursue their life experience goals.

We all have similar challenges when it comes to loss and grief, and the thing that makes this book most interesting is the lack of sugarcoating of anything explained within. Donna realizes that an honest depiction is what people respond to.

Donna describes several phases of her life in which she had to look to others for support as well as be introspective. This combination will inform her in her quest to move forward and nurture the idea of living the life that lovingly acknowledges the past while forging ahead into the future, which is something that does not come easily to most people.

After you read this book, you will be able to have that conversation with yourself that I mentioned in the beginning of this foreword. Although there is no one way to get your bucket list moving, Donna describes her way, which can be a cause for personal reflection. I think this book will inspire those who get caught in a rut of responsibility, loss, and grief. This happens to just about everyone, and reading this book reminds us that there is a way to lead your best life if you want to put the effort into figuring it out. This book also reminds us not to discount the joy in our everyday lives but to seek those things that enrich us and our loved ones.

Please enjoy this book and embrace its message. Live your best life and get your bucket list on the move.

—Rich Dalessandro

Today Is Someday

A cliché suburban picket fence existence. A driven, working wife with a kick-ass career and a super-supportive husband who worked together like a well-oiled machine. By my mid-thirties, I had my feet climbing the rungs of the corporate ladder at UnitedHealth Group—a Fortune 5 company (as of this writing). Why would I walk away after shattering the glass ceiling? Why was I part of The Big Quit?

The Big Quit, or The Great Resignation, was an economic trend where many US employees simultaneously resigned from their jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, benefits, wages, and working conditions were not why I quit. Anthony Klotz, a professor from Texas A&M coined the term Great Resignation, and he nailed it! From organizational research, we know that when human beings come into contact with death and illness in their lives, it causes them to take a step back and ask existential questions, Klotz told Jessica Stillman during an interview with Business Insider magazine. Like, what gives me purpose and happiness in life, and does that match up with how I’m spending my right now? So, in many cases, those reflections will lead to life pivots.

I was a senior leader in information technology. I did not hate my job, company, or boss, but I wanted, nay I needed, to take time to live. In August 2021, I left my career of thirty-two years. It was a culmination of a journey that started more than twelve years earlier.

This is my story.

It started one Saturday morning, my husband felt terribly off, so we drove to the hospital. I dropped him at the curb near the emergency room doors and parked the car while he checked in. As I pushed through the swinging door into the emergency room waiting area, the doctor scrambled over to me, his face pained, We’re doing everything we can to save your husband.

Wait, what?

My husband survived the heart attack, but that event changed some of our priorities and motivation in life. In our mid-thirties, we thought we understood our mortality. We created a bucket list of things we wanted to do, he changed careers, took a more flexible, less stressful job, and life was good.

Ten years later, we had life under control, or so we thought. It was then that my mother died at barely sixty-six years of age. She spent the last years of her life fighting two rounds of cancer, and the experience of her death hit me in a way I never imagined. My mother died with much living left in her. She wanted to fly in a hot air balloon, so I gave her a gift certificate for a flight and lunch for her sixtieth birthday, which she never used. She stopped living long before she died.

Less than a year after my mother died, my husband got lost on the way to our daughter’s college softball game, a route he’d taken many times. That day, he said he just felt confused.

Later that week, he had a headache that left him in tears and would not go away. We went to the emergency room, where the doctors recommended a CT scan. The scan revealed a mass in his brain the size of a golf ball. The surgeon thought it was benign at first, but it wasn’t.

Gut punched, in an instant, life went from a combination of a romance novel and a sitcom to a horror movie. My husband had a brain cancer called glioblastoma multiforme grade IV or GBM4. A terminal cancer so bad that the US Library of Medicine and National Institute of Health has nicknamed it The Terminator.

Even with treatment, glioblastoma is a deadly form of primary brain cancer with an average survival rate of twelve to fifteen months. Even today, nearly ten years later, less than 2 percent of people diagnosed with this cancer survive longer than two years. My husband passed away 355 days after diagnosis. He was only forty-six years old. Suddenly, I was a young widow.

I’ve structured this book in individual moments aligned with my life and my journey to reinvest in living after Ray’s death. There are some sensitive triggering topics. These times were pivot points for me. This book tells you my story, what worked for me, and what I have learned. It shares details of my caregiving experience and suggestions or tools that I found practical, and I wish I had known earlier.

Fifteen million people in the United States have lost a spouse. When you think of a widow, most of us imagine a woman in her eighties or nineties. The US Census Bureau reports the average age of a widow is fifty-nine. This means many are much younger. Even more startling is that almost 2,800 women, three times that of men, become widowed every day and outlive their husbands by fifteen to thirty years.

You will hear me use the term apocaloptimist throughout this book. An apocaloptimist is someone who understands life’s tragedy but tries to make the best of it. I am not making light of death.

Psychology Today calls death a taboo subject. Physicians have access to training in the ethics of death, but no one spoke to me about death until it was a need to know subject. Ray and I did not plan out our wishes for each other, even with our earlier experience. I certainly did not think about the additional stress it places on our loved ones who must make decisions when we cannot. No one practices calling a funeral home to make arrangements.

I also understand now, that with time, a new normal happens because there is no other option. Time passes, edges dull, bruised memories fade and pain blurs, but the echo remains, and one is changed.

Some chapters close with an opportunity to reflect. These moments are a chance to catch your breath before moving on. They are also a chance to think or act. You might have a conversation or create a contingency plan for an emergency. Maybe you’ll start your bucket list. I challenge you to do one thing differently after reading this book.

As for me, when I wasn’t looking and least expected it, my life pivoted once more. I met a widower. We married in February of 2021.

Mark and I decided to take some time to make memories while we were young enough to do so. Working our bucket list, writing this book, and living for today added up to my quit.

I hope you explore your vulnerability and develop curiosity by the end of this book. Maybe even become courageous and have conversations with loved ones. Even better, I hope you feel challenged to stop putting off living for the elusive someday. Most of all, I hope you will feel just a little tiny bit more prepared to face the future, even traumatic events, and be empowered to make progress on your bucket list.

I’d love to hear from you. Tell me about your journey. Drop me a note—email me at [e-mail]. Join my mailing list or tell me what you are doing on your bucket list.

Cheers,

Donna

Part 1:

Yesterday

Chapter 1:

Jersey Girl

If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

—Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

Violet, azure, and pink buds etched deep into the skin of my left foot from ankle to toe. By the third hour, my ears barely heard the hum of the pen as the needle deposited ink. My fingernails dug craters in my palm, and my top teeth bit my lip so hard it nearly drew blood as the clenched popsicle stick hung from my mouth like a snowman’s corn cob pipe. The mouthful of splintering wood served its purpose, distracting me from the searing pain that felt like a hot cast iron pan from the stove had landed on my foot. Instead of burnt flesh though, it was lavender incense that wafted past my nose. Once I was done, Lauren and I switched spots. A few more hours and the mirror image of my tattoo lay on Lauren’s right foot.

Years later, I sat on that beige dentist’s chair turned tattoo bench again as the artist added the words a single tear just above the three vibrant Morning Glory flowers. Those words, a loving memorial, placed to honor lies my husband told me.

August 26, 1983 was a Friday. The chocolate bar that I left in the car had turned to soup because it was so hot out. It was my rising senior year summer. Jersey girls had stiff plastered, high hair; feather cut, teased, and hair-sprayed to make it stand six inches tall. Guys wore blue jeans, Hawaiian print shorts, and parachute pants with Wayfarers and high-top basketball sneakers as Meatloaf played Paradise by the Dashboard Light when the second year of MTV music videos began. Yeeeeeee, ahh, ahh, I screamed as the vinyl seat stuck to my gym-short-clad legs. My hand flew to crank the windows down hoping to catch a breeze because there was no AC in my car, and I needed to get home before dark.

The party would start when the sun went down. If we were lucky, someone remembered music—the soundtrack of life on a battery-powered boombox. We held clear bottles with pure liquid gold; usually white wine or something swiped from a parent’s liquor cabinet. Others searched their pockets, dropped crumpled ones and fives into a baseball hat, and once full, someone would buy a keg of beer and plastic cups. If we needed to, we’d trek back into the woods to a secret location behind the junior high school. But we liked it better when we could hang out at one of our houses, and that Friday, it was my house.

Highland Avenue was a long, dead-end street with a salmon pink, vinyl sided, five-bedroom bungalow house at the end, right before the woods. It was built in the 1920s with a horseshoe drive and one lone tree stuck into the ground like a sandwich toothpick. That night, it had dozens of cars parked on the front lawn, while other cars lined the street. The jingle of keys sounded like tinkling bells as car doors slammed shut and folks headed to the backyard where a fire pit flared when someone tossed in a paper cup moist with alcohol.

Laughing at each other’s jokes and looking as if they owned the place, there were six man-boys who I had never seen before. One had their high-top sneakers propped on the picnic table holding court, beer in one hand and a smoke in the other. Not wanting to scare them off, I circled the yard approaching catlike, lest they see me and bolt before I could meet them.

Guys, can I take your picture? A disposable 35 MM camera propped on my hip, the perfect motive to approach. I smiled my best smile, the cheese baiting the trap. I knew full well these guys had nothing to do with my school. I’m editor of our yearbook, and this shot would make a great candid.

We don’t go to your school. One laughed.

Oooooh, I thought I’d forgotten your names, I winked, "since this is my house, and I sent out invites."

They chuckled. Everyone knew parties like these were word of mouth, there were no invites.

I asked again, Well, these aren’t really for the yearbook. Trap baited. Lemme, take your photo, puh-lease? I flashed a smile this time.

Yeah, okay, sure. They accepted my lame, meet-cute attempt as horny teenage boys did when a cheerleader approached.

I focused on the one in blue jeans and a tank top, "What’s your name? I tossed my hair. I’ll make sure you get a copy."

I’m Ruemosh, he said with a chuckle. It was the first time I’d heard that name. But you can call me Ray, only Joe’s grandma calls me that. I’d laugh at that later and call that lie number one, joking that he didn’t want me to know his real name. I looked through the camera lens and knew he would change my life forever.

I